How to create connections in Spotlight on SQL Server

Hi, my name is Richard Douglas and I'm a subject matter expert for SQL Server here at Dell Software. My job today is to help you make configuring Spotlight on SQL Server a super easy task.
Now before I can show you how intuitive Spotlight's monitoring and diagnostic capabilities are, I need to have something to monitor. And to be able to monitor a SQL Server or any of its associated technology, I need to create a connection in Spotlight. In this video, I'm going to show you just how easy it is to create connections so you can concentrate on being a superhero DBA.
Once you've installed Spotlight and opened the console for the first time, you will see a screen similar to the one being shown now. As you can see from the message in the middle of the screen, we can't show the Heat Map as no connections have been registered with Spotlight yet. Now this is a super easy thing to fix.
So as you can see, there's a Message here that says, "Currently there are no connections configured. Configure connections to create a Heat Map." Now we can either click on the Configure link or we can click on Configure in the menu options at the top, and click on Connections.
Now a new modal window has been created and it is entitled Spotlight Connection Manager. Now the simplest way of doing things now is to click on Discover. And this will check to see which SQL Server instances are on your network. Now I'd recommend this for people who aren't sure what it on their network. They can just go out and discover via this tool. If you do know what's in there and you're only going to be adding one or two instances, you might want to consider using the Add New Connection.
Now in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the Discover option. Now, this is going to show me the Connection Discovery Wizard and there are a couple of different options that we can choose here. In this scenario I'm going to stick with option one, which is to discover SQL Server instances from the network. However, if you're a more advanced user, you might want to import your SQL Server instances from a file. You can read the following information which will tell you the kind of information that you need to create these connections for you.
The Discovery Wizard has now finished and has provided me with a list of connections that I can now add. I'd like to draw your attention to this filter box up here in the top left hand corner. This gives me the ability to check to see if I want to copy all of this information across. You may have a naming convention which has something like the name Prod inside of your instances to dictate to people that they know it is a production license. So if I wanted to facilitate this, I could do something like *sql and this will just show me the connections that have the word "sql" in. So you can do something very, very similar for your environments.
In this scenario, what I want to do is add everything across, so I'm going to click on the Add All. And you can see that these have now been migrated across to the Connections to Monitor pool. I simply just click on Next, it's going to tell me that it's going to try and connect to each of these instances and it's going to use Windows Authentication. This is now telling me that we are ready to create our connections, and it's providing me with a list of connections that Spotlight is about to create.
The wizard is now telling me that the connections are now complete. And if I click on Finish, it is going to close the wizard. As you can see behind me, we now have a fully functioning Heat Map and we also have a list of, not just SQL Servers, but the associated Windows connections as well.
If I right click on one of these servers, I can choose their properties and I can see that these OS connections and the SQL Server are indeed linked together. Furthermore, what I can do is I can click on the Tags option up here on the tabs at the top, and I can add a tag. So if this was a production instance, I could add the tag production. And I could also add further tags as well. So I might want to add that this is a 2012 instance. And what this allows me to do is to logically group some of my server instances together, which may be helpful in some of the other configuration videos that we'll be showing you later on.
We're going to click OK. And now I have added some tags into my SQL Server Connection strings. Now it's very simple to add a number of these other connections as well. I can simply click on Analysis Services, click on Add, then I can add in the address. Again, I have the ability to link in the operating system as well.
If I want to add in a high availability option here, I click on Add. I add in the listener from my AlwaysOn Availability Group. If I wish to add a replication connection, I simply click on Replication, Click on Add. And here, this is where I would enter the distributor instance. So if I would've had a peer to peer replication topology, I would need to add both distributors into the connection details here.
If I'm looking at having SQL Azure, all I would do here is I would put in the address of my SQL Azure database, a database name alongside the username and the password.
For VMware we do much the same. We click on Add New Connection. We

This video gives a high-level overview of some of the features available in Spotlight Developer, a free SSMS plugin from Quest. The features highlighted in the video are shown from a developer's perspective, though these tools are traditionally used by DBAs.
Spotlight Developer installation video:
http://quest.com/video/how-to-install-spotlight-developer8121467
For some of the why’s and how’s of Spotlight Developer:
https://www.quest.com/community/b/en/posts/bridge-the-monitoring-gap-with-spotlight-developer
Detailed video on Spotlight Developer’s Query plan analysis:
https://www.spotlightessentials.com/spotlight-developer/query-plan-analysis/video
Related video on SQL Optimizer:
http://quest.com/video/optimizing-sql-server-code-in-toad-for-sql-server8118469

In this short video you'll learn how to install Spotlight Developer, a free tool that helps users of SQL Server Management Studio monitor all their connections via a heatmap, alarms list and realtime diagnostics.